The Roxby uranium mine
ELECTRICITY, RADIOACTIVE WASTES and WATER Some background to the operations at Roxby
from The Radioactive Show 13 March 1999
- Eric Miller interviews Dr Dennis Matthews from the Nuclear Issues Centre about the Roxby uranium mines power arrangements.
- Eric Miller interviews David Noonan from ACF Adelaide about the Laffery report on the Beverley uranium pilot plant.
ELECTRIC POWER
The South Australian power utility EDSA, has not been privatised yet, but the Roxby uranium mine in northern South Australia can buy its electric power from other states. And that is what is being done.
Eric Miller asked Dennis Matthews from the Nuclear Issues Centre in South Australia,
‘Has the Roxby mine made new arrangements for its power supply?’
Dennis Matthews: Yes it has. Since the expansion started up around January of this year, they’ve needed an extra 80 megawatts making a total of 180 megawatts power demand. That’s more or less 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year. This has put them in a very good bargaining position so they can actually go through the national electricity market, bargain and get a very good deal. The best deal you can get these days is from Victoria. So the cheapest electricity, sometimes a tenth of the price of what we have in South Australia, but always much less anyway, the best deal you can get is from Victoria through the inter-connector with Victoria.About a third of our electricity can come, and often does come, through that inter-connector and Roxby now has a big share of that cheap electricity from Victoria. Not the whole lot by any means, only about a fifth, so other people can get some for the time being. At a very much reduced rate.
Now what that means is that the people who had been getting their electricity from Victoria at this cheap rate will now no longer be able to get it and from now on a fifth of the electricity has been switched over to Roxby. And those people from, typically, South Australian businesses, small businesses and household consumers, will now have to pay a much higher rate.
Eric Miller: The South Australian people invested in all this generation now it is not needed.
Dennis Matthews: Not only did we invest in the generators in South Australia but we also invested in Roxby. And Roxby is showing how grateful they are by taking their business elsewhere.Eric Miller:
Does this mean that the greenhouse effect from Roxby will go up with the dirty brown coal that Victoria has?
Dennis Matthews: Yes. Victoria makes all of its electricity from brown coal that is not only very dirty, but it is also very energy inefficient. This means that it makes much more greenhouse gases than other pollutants per unit of electricity. In South Australia we use coal that is not very good grade either but we also use gas that is considered to be a lower emitter of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity. Roxby is already responsible for the biggest single amount of greenhouse gas emissions in South Australia, because of the power demands.
Eric Miller: Before this happened, Western Mining said they were going to generate their own electricity and were trying to bargain the South Australian company down.
Dennis Matthews: Yes, I think that was a bit of a bluff, part of the game. It was contradictory in a sense. They said, ‘We want cheap electricity. If the Government is not going to privatise EDSA and Optima, we are going to build our own power station.’ But the two are self-contradictory because if they were to build their own power station the electricity would have been a lot more expensive than the electricity in Victoria and even the electricity in South Australia simply because the other power stations in South Australia are already paid off. What they would be paying for is the cost generating and transmitting the electricity whereas Roxby would have had to pay for the cost of building and generating the electricity.
Eric Miller: It is really another downturn for having a uranium mine in your state!
RADIOACTIVE WASTES
Dennis Matthews: Well it is another negative affect. There are a heap of negative affects. They already use huge amounts of water from the artesian basin with the various affects on that area, on the Mound Springs, on the ecology of the area. Now they are using huge amounts of electricity with the negative affects that we have just discussed.
They are also generating the largest amount of radioactive waste, probably in the world. And they are going to eventually have something like 800 hectares, 35 metres high, of tailings. It will be the biggest pile of radioactive waste anywhere in the world, I think, by the time it is finished.
Eric Miller: Which South Australians will have to look after for eternity.
Dennis Matthews: Yes, forever, essentially. We are talking thousands and tens of thousands of years and for all intents and purposes, that’s eternity.
Linda Marks: And that was Dennis Matthews from the Nuclear Issues Centre in South Australia and he was telling us how Roxby uranium mine is now buying power from Victoria.
Still in South Australia, we go to the Beverley uranium mine that is in the Lake Frome area in northern South Australia. The Beverley mine is still going through the EIS process although it has had a pilot plant operating there for over a year. Beverley is wholly operated by an American company, the nuclear giant, General Atomics. With overwhelming evidence that the aquifer could be contaminated by the mine, Senator Hill and the South Australian Government brought in an independent expert in the in situ leaching method of mining the uranium last year. Hydrologist Ms. April Lafferty of the American Science Inc visited the site late last year.
WATER
David Noonan, Campaign Officer for the ACF in Adelaide has been trying to get a copy of the Lafferty report through the Freedom of Information Act. Eric asked David if he had been able to get a copy of that report yet and if so, what was in it?
David Noonan: The Commonwealth had to release the Lafferty report. Someone leaked it before they were legally obliged to provide it to ACF under the Freedom of Information Act. The Lafferty report in effect confirms that it was only the opinion of General Atomics that the local aquifer that the mining will take place in is actually said to be confined. Lafferty confirmed that the available studies and the available information was insufficient to support the assumptions being made by the company. Therefore there was a risk of contamination, especially of near surface aquifers, local aquifers, from waste and from mining liquids used in this sulphuric acid in situ leach uranium mining technique. Should there be a hydraulic connection between those aquifers, and the evidence wasn’t really there to support the company assumption that there was no such connection.
Eric Miller: So it is possible that this mining operation could contaminate the other aquifers in the surrounding area.
David Noonan: Should there be a connection between them that could certainly be the case that they are at risk. The company and the government have gone ahead with the trial mine for some 12 months without even having the base line environmental information. They had given those approvals, including the approvals from Senator Hill, to allow the trial mine to go ahead without an EIS. This was on a level of information that would not have been unacceptable, or would have been contrary to the standards for a similar mining operation in the US.
Eric Miller: So this would not have complied with US mining regulations.
David Noonan: Certainly not on the level of information that has been provided by the company as proponents of the project to government. In the US they would have been required a great deal further information, a lot more thorough studies. In the case of General Atomics they were often relying on single monitoring tests whereas in the US you would have to have a series of tests. And much of the information cited by General Atomics here for Beverley had come from previous mining companies’ operations. The supposed results of those tests could not be substantiated because there was insufficient information available, left available or ever available as to what standard they had carried out those tests.
Eric Miller: Where does the process go now with the EIS
David Noonan: Well, Senator Hill has falsely claimed that there are no environmental reasons why the project should not go ahead. However, he’s had to order further tests of the ground water system as recommended by Laffery, the consultant. And he has to take the very interesting unique step of not allowing the company to discharge liquid wastes to ground water until those tests are in and until government has assessed those tests. Those tests of the ground water system.
In effect he has had to take back an approval he gave to General Atomics at the start of last year to allow them to discharge all their liquid wastes, including radioactive wastes, to ground water at that site. So that’s a win for the conservation movement. It’s a small one compared to the damage that the project will bring.
One of the fundamental points from Lafferty was that the failure of the government to order rehabilitation of ground water was one of the substantial points that placed other aquifers at risk. If they failed to rehabilitate ground water then there is that continuing risk in the long term for these toxic, now highly mobile materials, radioactive and heavy metals and sulphuric acid etcetera, to move from the Beverley aquifer into adjoining near surface aquifers. So it is the failure of government to have credible standards in the first place. Their failure to require adequate environment base line information, their failure to put the trial mine through an EIS process that would have exposed these sorts of things. That’s where the problem really is laying. Now, once the studies are in, the more thorough studies of ground water, the government will assess those studies again. They will have Lafferty’s advice on those studies, and at that point they will decide whether the company has to submit a new plan of management of liquid wastes for the mining proposal. And again they would get advice from Lafferty as to what conditions they might place on such a plan.
Unfortunately Senator Hill doesn’t recognise the main problem. The cause of all these problems is that he is allowing uranium mining on that site and he is allowing this first use in the Western world of commercial sulphuric acid in situ leach uranium mining. So, we’ve yet to get Senator Hill to understand those point. But he hadSbeen forced in effect, because of the errors they have made up to now, to take back his initial approval to liquid discharge at Beverley.
Eric Miller: In South Australia you have another uranium mine, the Honeymoon mine, using the same process.
David Noonan: It’s very much the same situation where they were allowed to discharge liquid wastes to ground water throughout last year. Given that Senator Hill has had to recognise that that was never acceptable in the case of Beverley. Now after the event, he should be taking back the approval to Southern Cross at Honeymoon to discharge their radioactive wastes, including all their liquid wastes the mining operations into ground water there. He hasn’t yet taken that step and we intend to force him to do so.
Linda Marks: And that was David Noonan from the Australian Conservation Foundation office in Adelaide. The Honeymoon mine also uses in situ leaching as a way of extracting the uranium. This is where sulphuric acid is pumped through a bore into an ore body, and then sucked out. We understand that the EIS for Honeymoon has been written but they are waiting to see what happens at Beverley before presenting it.
